Excel and Google Sheets have a function called MID. This function allows you to return text from the middle of a text string based on a start character and the number of characters that you want to include.
In our example, we have a list of inventory items.
Let's say we wanted to create a column to just show the inventory number. We can use the MID function to do this. For this function, we need 3 things:
Text: this is the text string that you are referencing
Start_num: this is the character number that you want to start at. In our example, each item has the phrase “Item #” in front of the actual item number. Because that text is 6 characters long, we want to start with the 7th character.
Num_chars: this is the number of characters that you want to actually return. Since all of our item numbers are 5 digits long, we can type a 5.
With that function, we can also pull down the function to other rows and get the item number for each row.
Watch the video above to see how to get the item name using the MID function.